Cap­tur­ing the Sun

You do not have to worry about cap­tur­ing the sun­set of Oia to­day as you still have 4.5 bil­lion years ahead!

• The Sun is 4.65 bil­lion years old and it is es­ti­mated that it will still live as much.

• The en­ergy emit­ted by the Sun in one sec­ond cov­ers Europe's en­ergy needs for 13 million years.

• With the cheap­est elec­tric­ity in­voice, the en­ergy that the Sun trans­mits in space in one sec­ond would have a value equal to the bud­get of Greece for 10,000 tril­lion years.

• If we shrank the Sun in the size of an or­ange, the Earth would be at a dis­tance of 15m hav­ing the size of a se­same seed, while the next star, Prox­ima Cen­tauri (or Al­pha Cen­tauri C), would be 4,000 km away.

• The Earth - Sun dis­tance is called Astro­nom­i­cal Unit and is equal to 149,600,000 km.

• If we had to walk from Earth to the Sun, we would need 2,123 years.

• If we used a car that would travel non-stop at 100 km / h, we would need 170 years.

• An air­plane that flies at 800 km / h would cover the same dis­tance in 21 years.

• Yet, a ray of light only takes 8 min­utes and 20 sec­onds to cover the same dis­tance.

• Greek philoso­pher, math­e­ma­ti­cian and as­tronomer Thales of Mile­tus was the first per­son to pre­dict a to­tal so­lar eclipse in 585 BC.

• Dur­ing a to­tal so­lar eclipse, the moon's shadow on Earth has a di­am­e­ter of 270 km and runs at a speed of 1,675 km / h.

• The first photo of the Sun (da­guerreo­type) was taken in 1842. So, keep on trav­el­ling!

In­for­ma­tion from the book “The 7 won­ders of the World” by D. Si­mopou­los and A. De­livo­rias, Eu­genides Foun­da­tion, Athens 2008.